Christmas Review: Genes are us

Back in the 1950s it was the physicists who were eternally being cast
as latter-day Dr Frankensteins. The biologists were mostly portrayed as
the good guys who had given the world penicillin. Not any more. The political
and scientific upheavals of the 1980s have considerably blurred scientists’
roles in the theatre of fear: Einstein’s monsters – nuclear weapons – have
lost their bite, while the breathtaking pace of research into molecular
genetics, and in particular biology’s three-year-old quest to decode the
human genome, has led to dark mutterings about a new age of eugenics and
genetic discrimination.

At its bleakest, the vision is one of prospective parents subjecting
fetuses relentlessly to genetic tests and discarding those that fail, of
people with ‘bad genes’ being refused health insurance, jobs or possibly
even the right to have children, of companies vying for the commercial rights
to exploit human genes and then burdening us all with genetic tests we neither
need nor want. During the next ten years the world’s genetics laboratories
will produce an unprecedented avalanche of information about the DNA sequences
and functions of the 100 000 or so genes etched in our chromosomes. If we
don’t watch out, say worried onlookers, the information could end up in
the wrong hands.

Advertisement

Irrational scaremongering or well-grounded fears? Most molecular geneticists
naturally enjoy playing up the positive side of the Human Genome Project,
claiming it will lead to medical riches beyond our wildest dreams. With
genetic information, they say, will come the means to diagnose and to treat,
hundreds of hereditary illnesses. Then we can detect predispositions to
diabetes, heart disease or lung cancer so we may ward off the risks with
a change in diet or lifestyle. But all this comes with a Faustian price
tag, say critics, ethicists and biologists concerned about the reductionist
ideology propelling molecular genetics. And what’s more, the medical riches
may be illusory.

Whoever is right, DNA, power and medicine are the perfect ingredients
for a scientific potboiler, and in recent years book – shelves have begun
to creak under the collective weight of lay guides to molecular genetics
and the Human Genome Project. Of these, Tom Wilkie’s Perilous Knowledge
provides the most incisive account of the moral and economic dilemmas, while
Steve Jones’s The Language of the Genes offers an inspired grand tour of
what genetics can and cannot tell us about ourselves and our evolutionary
history.

The books are very different. Wilkie is science editor of The Independent
and his voice is that of the seasoned journalist asking difficult moral
and political questions. Who will control the avalanche of genetic information,
he asks: researchers, ethics committees or the darker forces of commerce?
What are the pros and cons of screening people and fetuses for genetic defects?
In grappling with these dilemmas, Wilkie never lapses into cheap antiscience
polemic. Nor, to his credit, does he whip up fears by overselling the technological
powers of molecular genetics. On the contrary: he goes out of his way to
exorcise ghoulish notions of made-to-order humans and ‘gene supermarkets’
for prospective parents, and argues that scientists have so far oversold
the promise of gene therapy for nonreproductive cells.

It’s depressingly clear from both books that nobody need bother to concoct
ghouls: the ghosts of genetics past are frightening enough. Between 1905
and 1973, Wilkie reminds us, 100 000 ‘feeble-minded’ women were compulsorily
sterilised in that great democracy, the US. And in the 1970s, when some
states in the US dabbled in obligatory screening of black Americans for
the gene for sickle-cell anaemia, the result was a bout of discrimination
against carriers at no risk whatsoever of developing symptoms. Jones is
especially good at lampooning eugenicists. In 1926, he drily informs us,
the American Eugenics Society displayed a board with flashing lights recording
the $100 per second allegedly spent on people with ‘bad heredity’.

As a professional geneticist-cum-broadcaster Jones might be expected
to paint a less gloomy picture than Wilkie. And by and large he does. Wilkie
sinks his teeth into the Human Genome Project like a tenacious terrier,
while Jones whisks you through wittily written chapters on the genetics
of sexual selection, inbreeding, race and human origins. Wilkie worries
about molecular genetics leading us into a ‘moral vacuum’ in which human
life is regarded as no more than ‘a biochemical computer program’; Jones
writes of geneticists having largely abandoned incautious claims that the
essence of humanity lies in DNA. Wilkie brings into grim focus a future
in which ‘a corpus of genetic surgeons’ take ‘technical control over the
future of genetic composition of the human race’; Jones speaks breezily
of ‘a new age of genetic well-being’ brought about by increased mixing of
races and previously separated groups.

This is partly because the two authors set out with very different aims:
Jones to explain the evolutionary forces shaping human genetics, Wilkie
to expose the ethical problems of genetic technologies. When Wilkie tells
you how selective pressure from the malarial parasite spread the gene for
sickle-cell anaemia, he does so as a prelude to a darker exposition on ethics.
Jones offers up such subjects as fascinating stories in their own right.

But there is also an element of ‘trust me I’m a geneticist’ in Jones’
reassuring words. To which one must naturally respond: do all geneticists
think like him? The answer would seem to be no. For while Jones makes it
abundantly clear that he thinks anyone who goes searching for genes linked
to complex behavioural traits such as sexuality is on a wild goose chase,
others are out chasing – and claiming to catch – the goose.